Django Bates, Kings Place, London, review

“I’ve always found it hard to act my age,” says Django Bates and, as this 50th birthday gig showed, he’s still putting off the evil day when he has to knuckle down and become a grown-up jazz artist. Deep down he’s the same lad who was fascinated by his father’s collection of Romanian folk music and African drums. He still treats his jazz quintet as if he’s just discovered it and is eager to see how many sounds it can make. He’s bothered by things everyone else learns to live with, like traffic noise, and he writes songs about them. And he still loves flinging incongruous sounds like cow moos and alarm clocks into a “normal” jazz texture.

All this was endearing in the 23-year-old who co-founded Loose Tubes. Is it still so in the 50-year-old? Well, sort of. For me there was one cow moo and alarm call too many. And the song about traffic noise was just annoying, enjoying its own “noisy” eccentricity without taking the musical ideas anywhere.

It’s a shame that Bates’s whimsy sometimes overshadows his musicality and originality, which as this gig reminded us are formidable. He loped on stage, looking as always like an undernourished elf, in a tie-dyed shirt and, round his neck, one of those plastic floral chains sold outside Hindu temples.

The set got off to a cracking start with Yellow Hill from Loose Tubes’ first album. The energy was astounding, Michael Mondesir’s electric bass leaping and surging beneath, Martin France’s agile beat leaving space and air for Marius Neset’s saxophone and Bates himself on electric keyboards.

After this tidal wave of energy, the startlingly blonde Swedish singer Josefine Lindstrand joined the quartet, and gave us an amusingly satirical take on Sinatra’s dreadful anthem My Way, and a nicely wry rendition of You Live and Learn from Bates’s latest album. The best of the songs was Horses in Rain, a touching meditation inspired by the patient, dumb way animals have of enduring bad weather.

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This pointed to the treasurable things about Bates: his ability to find the pathos in odd corners of life, his utterly personal feeling for harmony and his wonderful way of giving electric keyboards a human, speaking quality. But as well as birthday greetings, I should like to add: embrace your age. Keep your energy and your contrarian passions. But ditch the whimsy – and that tie-dyed shirt.